Please excuse this form letter response, but your submission
doesn't rate anything better. Publishers are rich, and we didn't
get that way by throwing away good money on secretaries.
Publishers are powerful, and we didn't get that way by wasting
our valuable time on little people. Publishers are leaders, and
we didn't get that way by following lost souls around in the back
woods. In short, you should be grateful that we even bothered to
reply at all.

We regret to inform you that your submitted material does not
guarantee us a sufficiently high profit margin for us to bother
investing any of our resources into it. You may be comforted to
know that your material was briefly skimmed by a temporary
employee with no aptitude, who probably made a decision to reject
your material based upon some childish foible or psychic
flatulence, and that it probably has some literary merit, if
anyone is willing to spend more than fifty seconds on it ...
which we are not. You may be assured that if we ever truly wanted
to create a silk purse from a sow's ear, then we would
do so without compunction for our employee's relatives and
friends, for our partner's divorce lawyers and paramours, for our
fellow elitists, and for those authors who include explicit
personal photographs. If extortion and nepotism was good enough
for our founders, then it's good enough for us!

We're not going to apologize for our "no
multiple submission" policy, nor for taking almost forever
to inform you of our decision, because of the standard
Golden Rule ... the one with the gold makes
the rules. It's too bad that your work has grown stale while
residing in our slush pile, and that television has done re-runs
of your storyline or plot hook, but that's not
our problem ... someday, when you are in the mood, telephone us
for a short list of our current crises. If writing wasn't so
easy, and we weren't overwhelmed with more material than we could
possibly use in the next century, and if we didn't spend months
in editorial conferences and weeks in marketing committees, then
you could have a prompt reply ... and you'd quickly know not to
quit your day job for haphazard freelancing.

Let me put it this way: try to remember that publishing is a
business built on the labor of wordsmiths, who are paid as little
as possible; so words are sold like widgets as long as there's a
gullible market. Publishing has nothing to do
with "literature", so don't bother us with nauseating
plaints about "eternal verbiage", because anything that
old isn't protected by exclusive copyright. Maybe the next time
you compose something, you'll stay focused on the bottom-line ...
the one drawn by our accountant, and not by your
desktop computer. Good luck on your new venture.